Totally drought-tolerant

Italians seem to have a crush on the idea of deserts. We've been looking in a lot of home-goods stores, and I've noticed they all offer fake cactus plants and faux succulents. Rendered in ceramics, plastic, or metal, these artificial desert flora are even lower maintenance than the real-life versions but can still give your casa that exciting Death Valley look. Here's a sample from our shopping trip yesterday.

In metal...

...metal above, plastic below...

...ceramic....

....plastic...

...and more plastic

I'd love to buy all of them and turn our living room into a faux desert preserve, but keeping them all dusted would probably be a nightmare.

One of our favorite local trattorie has an impressive display of barrel cactus in the dining room. They are plastic, too. And, as you can see, very much of a piece with the overall decorative scheme. In this photo they kind of match the clientele, too.










Danny, being a lover of both deserts and desert plants, already bought a real cactus when he was here in November. It has been living happily in our living-room window ever since. If the weather continues to warm up, it will soon move out to the balcony. It looks like it even might bloom.

To round out the plant theme, let me report that yesterday Danny chose some (real live) herbs for the kitchen windowsill while we were shopping at OBI, the local version of Home Depot The only ones on offer were thyme, oregano, sage, marjoram, parsley, and rosemary, but they had dozens of each. We bought the first three and hope to make good use of them.